by Aloys » Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:51 am
That is not original but: Unreal Engine, and CryEngine are both great candidates. They are not only great renderers, they are all around very solid engines, full of features, easy to work with, and very well documented. And more important, both of them are totally free right now for non-commercial uses. Which means you can absolutely create an Uru knock-off and distribute it for free. (As long as legal issues are cleared with Cyan, obviously).
And unlike what many people think, they can run very decently on older machines; as long as the assets you're feeding them aren't horribly demanding and you're still aiming for directX 9 compatibility.
They might be FPS engines at the core, and dealing with the 3rd person nature of Uru will probably require more work than with Plasma, but the same can be said of any engine than is not Plasma.. Playing the avatar animations properly; aligning it with books/levers etc is annoying. But Plasma's animation system is quite outdated regarding this; so with a bit of work porting this to a new engine would actually be an improvement; both Unreal and Crysis have great animation engines. Puzzle scripting will also take a bit of work; but again, Plasma was designed specifically for Uru; so moving to any other engine will be a pain. Might as well go with the better engines then. Honnestly at this moment I don't see any reason for a non-commercial project not to go with any of those two. They're the best engines around, they've got great documentation, and they're free.
I don't have much knowledge of Unity; but I hear good things about it. The guys over at Starry Expanse certainly seem happy enough with it. I've no idea how it would handle avatars though.